HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: In response to yesterdays’ post on MBA school applications drying up, reader Kevin O’Brien writes:

I’m a member of an operations consulting partnership.

One of my fellow partners, whom I’ve been working closely with, is a Chicago MBA which is a whole different level of prestige from the small, regionally but not AACSB-accreditted online business school I did (Daniel Webster College). My degree is comparatively worthless in the prestige stakes. (Not quite Yale Law vs. Thomas Cooley, but that’s not impossibly far off). But what I wanted was to know the stuff that MBA’s know for my own good, after losing a bundle in a business failure. Not to meet the people that people meet in B-school (I already knew lots of those people).

It seems like I know the same stuff. He might have had more drilling on quant stuff, I had an intensive capstone project. I paid as I went and accrued zero debt, while working full time and doing National Guard part time (until I retired from that). My Chicago buddy is a bright and hardworking guy and has paid off the debt he accrued, but it was a lot and he had to work for a guy he didn’t respect, for quite a while, to do it.

Now we’re both pretty happy and surviving despite the down economy. Smart guys always land on their feet. There are many paths to debt-free nirvana but you have to have a plan.

One thing every would-be b-school (or anything) student should do, and one thing every student’s parent should do, is read your book. If you knew how often I hear some friend’s son or daughter tell me their vague plans to major in psychology or political science, with a backup plan of going to law school –any law school– if the undergrad degree proves worthless in the job market, you’d yowl. I recommend the living daylights out of your Ed Bubble book, which I read in one sitting.

Thanks! It could save some people some money. And some grief.